Granny says, "Dat's right - its the Aflockalypse...Aflockalypse now? Turns out mass bird deaths are quite common.January 7, 2011 Washington - Aflockalypse: Despite alarming headlines about dead birds plummeting from the sky, biologists say that mass die-offs happen all the time, and do not necessarily augur catastrophe, either biblical or environmental, or any kind of 'aflockalypse.'

First, the blackbirds fell out of the sky on New Year's Eve in Arkansas. In recent days, wildlife have mysteriously died in big numbers: 2 million fish in the Chesapeake Bay, 150 tons of red tilapia in Vietnam, 40,000 crabs in Britain and other places across the world. Blogs connected the deadly dots, joking about the "aflockalypse" while others saw real signs of something sinister, either biblical or environmental. The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time aFederal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other. "They generally fly under the radar," said ornithologist John Wiens, chief scientist at the California research institution PRBO Conservation Science.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin has tracked mass deaths among birds, fish and other critters, said wildlife disease specialist LeAnn White. At times the sky and the streams just turn deadly. Sometimes it's disease, sometimes pollution. Other times it's just a mystery. In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California. On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada. "Depending on the species, these things don't even get reported," White said.

Weather — cold and wet weather like in Arkansas New Year's Eve when the birds fell out of the sky — is often associated with mass bird deaths, ornithologists say. Pollution, parasites and disease also cause mass deaths. Some are even blaming fireworks for the blackbird deaths. So what's happening this time? Blame technology, says famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. With the Internet, cell phones and worldwide communications, people are noticing events, connecting the dots more. "This instant and global communication, it's just a human instinct to read mystery and portents of dangers and wondrous things in events that are unusual," Wilson told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Not to worry, these are not portents that the world is about to come to an end."

Wilson and the others say instant communications — especially when people can whip out smart phones to take pictures of critter carcasses and then post them on the Internet — is giving a skewed view of what is happening in the environment. The irony is that mass die-offs — usually of animals with large populations — are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored, Wilson said.nd usually are unrelated.

I bet this is one of those things that is common but the media is now going with it and now everyone is out there trying to find these things.

The world is a huge place.

This is what I think. I went to school in Erie, PA and every spring, there would be thousands of dead fish that would wash up on the shore of the beach. Turns out the city dumps plowed snow into the lake. The snow has all the salt from the roads and the lake is freshwater.

Added to that, the city is on a hill, that slopes down to the lake, so the rain washes everything down into the lake.

The media is hunting for these stories just to get people to watch. "oh no, the world is coming to an end....look at all these dead birds and fish!!" In a month we'll never here any more of this as they'll be reporting on some other "at the moment" story.

Hundreds Of Dead Birds Along Alabama Highway...300 black birds found dead along I-65Jan 12, 2011 – As drivers whiz by the Huntsville-Browns Ferry Road exit on I-65 North, specks of black in the stark white snow are pretty hard to miss.

Upon a closer look, you'll see that there are scores of dead black birds, about 300 of them. Wildlife biologist Bill Gates of the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge said they're grackles, a native black bird. "What we want to do is see if there's any external signs of damage, or why it might have died," he said.

Gates said feathers scattered across the area point to signs of trauma. "If something happened to scare them up, and they tried to fly across the road in a flock and a semi or something like that could've hit them," he said. But to be sure, Gates is collecting samples to send off to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Scientists there will run a battery of tests to determine exactly what killed the birds, just as they've done recently, when thousands of dead birds were found in at least four other states. "Typically large numbers of birds die from disease, from poisonings and from being hit by objects or flying into objects," Gates said. "Really you can't rule any of those out until the birds have been examined." Gates said results from the lab could take about a month or two.

The Portage County Humane Society is trying to figure out what caused 200 cows in the town of Stockton to perish. Deputies were dispatched to the town just after 1 p.m. on Friday after they were notified of numerous dead cows lying in a field in the 8000 block of Fourth Avenue, according to a Portage County Sheriff's Department news release.

The owner of the cattle reportedly told deputies that he had been working with a local veterinarian and suspected that the animals died from either infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, or IBR, or bovine virus diarrhea, or BVD, the Sheriff's Department said. According to Cattletoday.info, IBR, aka red nose, is an acute, contagious virus of cattle that usually occurs in the air passages of the cow's head or its windpipe.

Cattle of all ages that have not been vaccinated or have not recovered from the disease are susceptible to IBR, the website says. BVD can cause numerous problems, according to the site, such as damage to the cow's digestive and immune systems, pneumonia, abortions and calf deformities. Samples of the dead animals have been sent to Madison for testing.

Neither the Sheriff's Department sergeant who wrote the press release nor the humane society officer who took the farmer's statement could be reached for comment Friday evening when information about the incident was released to the media. Attempts to reach a large animal veterinarian also were unsuccessful. The investigation is being handled by the Portage County Humane Society. There is no threat to humans or other animals, the Portage County Sheriff's Department said.

100 Dead Fish In Wales14 Jan 2011 - MORE dead animals have continued to show up today - as 100 dead FISH add to the toll.

Welsh families awoke this morning to find 100 dead carp, bream and roach fish floating in the waters of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal in Cwmbran. Colin Breeze, 62, spotted them and has now written to Torfaen Council to try and solve the puzzle. He said: "Perhaps it is the end of the world.

"I think they could have been frozen in the ice, but at the same time it was a bit of a shock especially with all these animal deaths we keep hearing about. A spokeswoman for Environment Agency Wales said they had visited the site and said the council would remove the fish. She said a lack of oxygen was the most likely reason for the fish deaths, as readings they took were very low.

A spokeswoman for Torfaen council confirmed they would remove the fish today. The grisly discover comes after thousands of dead fish were found floating in Florida after a cold snap and 200 lifeless birds were discovered in Texas.

More fishy deaths have seen 100 tons of sardines, croaker and catfish wash up on the Brazilian coast, New Zealand have hundreds of deceased fish and Britain find 40,000 devil crabs. Yesterday 300 grackles fell from the sky in Alabama and were found along the l-65 highway. Samples are being analysed to work out their cause of death, but one theory is that they collided with a large truck.

More than 100 dead birds found off Calif. Highway 101 near Geyserville, cause of death unknown
GEYSERVILLE, Calif. (AP) — California wildlife officials are trying to figure out what caused the death of more than 100 birds found clustered together just off Highway 101.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports that California Highway Patrol officers found the dead birds near the roadway on Saturday and called in the state Department of Fish and Game to investigate.

The officers who found the birds described them as small with brown and black feathers. They were intact and had not been shot.

The reports come as other, larger bird deaths have been reported in Arkansas, Louisiana and other states.

Rules “I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.” -- Ronald Reagan
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. -- Ann Coulter
"I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don't want to impose my moral values on others." -- Ann Coulter on Fox News 6/22/09Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men.Boondock Saints

How does this account for the blunt force trauma of the birds in Arkansas?...Bye Bye Blackbird: USDA acknowledges a hand in one mass bird deathJanuary 20, 2011 - One in a series of mysterious mass bird deaths in the past month was the product of a USDA avicide program, which began as operation Bye Bye Blackbird in the 1960s.

It's not the "aflockalyptic" fallout from a secret US weapon lab as some have theorized. But the government acknowledged Thursday that it had a hand in one of a string of mysterious mass bird deaths that have spooked residents in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, South Dakota, and Kentucky in the last month. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) took responsibility for hundreds of dead starlings that were found on the ground and frozen in trees in a Yankton, S.D., park on Monday.

The USDA's Wildlife Services Program, which contracts with farmers for bird control, said it used an avicide poison called DRC-1339 to cull a roost of 5,000 birds that were defecating on a farmer's cattle feed across the state line in Nebraska. But officials said the agency had nothing to do with large and dense recent bird kills in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Nevertheless, the USDA's role in the South Dakota bird deaths puts a focus on a little-known government bird-control program that began in the 1960s under the name of Bye Bye Blackbird, which eventually became part of the USDA and was housed in the late '60s at a NASA facility. In 2009, USDA agents euthanized more than 4 million red-winged blackbirds, starlings, cowbirds, and grackles, primarily using pesticides that the government says are not harmful to pets or humans.

In addition to the USDA program, a so-called depredation order from the US Fish and Wildlife Service allows blackbirds, grackles, and starlings to be killed by anyone who says they pose health risks or cause economic damage. Though a permit is needed in some instances, the order is largely intended to cut through red tape for farmers, who often employ private contractors to kill the birds and do not need to report their bird culls to any authority. "Every winter, there's massive and purposeful kills of these blackbirds," says Greg Butcher, the bird conservation director at the National Audubon Society. "These guys are professionals, and they don't want to advertise their work. They like to work fast, efficiently, and out of sight."

Granny says it's just like dem plagues in Revelation - we all gonna die...Animal-Related Diseases Concern ScientistsJanuary 04, 2012 : Health researchers and wildlife biologists say the number of infectious diseases that have jumped the boundary from animals to humans and between animal species is on the rise. Scientists believe the increase may be a result of more frequent contact between humans and wild animals, as well as the growing trade in wild animals, both legal and illegal.

Towards the end of the 1990s, several Asian countries lived one of their worst health nightmares. A new, highly pathogenic, strain of Avian Influenza known as H5N1 killed hundreds of people. Over the next years, more than 9-million chickens were destroyed in an effort to stem the epidemic. Scientists believe the H5N1 virus was transmitted from wild birds to domestic poultry and pigs, which then passed it to humans. H5N1 is just the latest of various influenza strains that have killed up to 100 million people over the last century.

Now scientists are concerned about the appearance of new illnesses. Jonathan Sleeman is the director of the National Wildlife Health Center at the U.S. Geological Survey. "Human health, wildlife health and domestic animal health are all interconnect within the context of the environment," said Sleeman. "And environmental changes and changes in environmental quality will have negative impacts in all 3 groups."

Experts say there are many causes: the increasingly rapid movement of people and animals around the world, increasing human contact with and consumption of wildlife, and the legal and illegal trade in wild animals. "It's no longer a wildlife conservation issue, it's no longer a separate human issue. It's a combination. It's both a conservation and human health issue," added said Sleeman. Scientists from a variety of disciplines met recently in Washington to share their concerns about pathogens spreading from animals to humans.

It's not a new problem. The AIDS virus, HIV, is now known to have originated from a similar virus in African chimpanzees. An estimated 30-million people have died of AIDS since the early 1980s. Other human diseases with animal origins include SARS, Ebola hemorrhagic fever and West Nile encephalitis. New animal illnesses generally originate in invasive species. Zebra mussels that have spread throughout the U.S. Great Lake introduced a type of botulism that has killed some 100,000 birds in the last decade. A fungus spread by the trade in amphibians has led to the extinction of about 120 species of frogs around the world. Many other imported, exotic animals escape or are released into local ecosystems. They disrupt native ecologies, out-compete native species and potentially spread new diseases.

Jonathan Epstein, with the EcoHealth Alliance, says 13 million animals have been confiscated in the past few decades, as part of the illegal trade in exotic species. "The global illegal wildlife trade is second only to the trade in narcotics and weapons," said Epstein. "Just between 2000 and 2006, we had about 1.5 billion animals imported into the U.S." Experts say more attention must be paid to the human disruption of wildlife and ecosystems to avoid the emergence of other infectious diseases with deeper and even more severe consequences.

Global warmin' killin' all the fish...Thousands of fish die as central US streams heat upTue, Aug 07, 2012 - Thousands of fish are dying in the central US as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 38°C.

About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week, as water temperatures reached 36.1°C. Nebraska fishery officials said they have seen thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, carp and other species in the Lower Platte River, including the endangered pallid sturgeon. Biologists in Illinois said the hot weather had killed tens of thousands of large and smallmouth bass and channel catfish and is threatening the population of the greater redhorse fish, a state-endangered species. So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators. “It’s something I’ve never seen in my career, and I’ve been here for more than 17 years,” said Mark Flammang, a fisheries biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “I think what we’re mainly dealing with here are the extremely low flows and this unparalleled heat.”

The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal US Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the US Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation’s counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states — as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken over the last month. Flammang said weekend rain improved some of Iowa’s rivers and lakes, but temperatures were rising again and straining a sturgeon population that develops health problems when water temperatures climb between 26°C and 32°C. “Those fish have been in these rivers for thousands of thousands of years, and they’re accustomed to all sorts of weather conditions, but sometimes, you have conditions occur that are outside their realm of tolerance,” he said.

In Illinois, heat and lack of rain has dried up a large swath of Aux Sable Creek, the state’s largest habitat for the endangered greater redhorse, a large bottom-feeding fish, said Dan Stephenson, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands [killed], maybe millions by now,” Stephenson said. “If you’re only talking about game fish, it’s probably in the thousands, but for all fish, it’s probably in the millions if you look statewide.” Stephenson said fish kills happen most summers in small private ponds and streams, but the hot weather this year has made the situation much worse. “This year has been really, really bad — disproportionately bad, compared to our other years,” he said.